BY CAROLINE OVERINGTON

Judy Atkinson has worked in remote Aboriginal communities for more than 25 years and so is haunted by many things. "But I clearly remember one incident," she says. "I was working way up north and at the end of the day I was taken to the room where I was supposed to be sleeping. I opened the door and saw the bed. It was filthy, just red with dust. And at both ends of the bed there was a stack of pornography, hard-core pornography, at least a foot high.

"I looked at the man who had led me there and I thought: 'What are you playing at?' But later I realised, this is normal. This is how men in these communities have learned to behave."

It was not the first time Atkinson, head of the College of Indigenous Australian Peoples at Southern Cross University, had seen pornography openly displayed in remote communities. On other occasions, she has seen men - "uncles" - watching hard-core, violent pornographic movies while three and four-year-olds in nappies played in the dust around their feet.

Atkinson told a forum in Canberra that Aboriginal communities were saturated with pornography and the victims were children.

"There is a difference between a middle-class couple in Canberra watching porn and a group of young boys in some remote community in the NT who have no real access to education," she said. "If you're a married couple with no real problems, maybe a bit of soft pornography is even going to benefit you, but not up there, not where people are on the grog and on the petrol. It's a problem worse than alcohol."

Two days after Atkinson made her claims in Canberra, a youth worker in a remote Northern Territory community told ABC television's Lateline that she had seen "children as young as five, who were watching pornography in abandoned houses while their parents were 200km away, drinking."
Lara Wieland, a doctor who has worked and lived in remote communities, tells Inquirer: "When I was in Cape York, pornography was everywhere and women in the community would come to us and complain about it."

There seems little doubt, then, that excessive consumption of pornography must be included among the many terrible scourges - alcoholism, poverty, petrol sniffing and aimlessness - that plague indigenous communities. Federal Attorney-General Philip Ruddock this week proposed dealing with the problem by launching spot raids on the homes of men who view the hard stuff in front of children. But the problem isn't restricted to Aboriginal communities. Pornography is an industry where the size of everything tends to be exaggerated, but there is no doubt it's huge. According to Forbes magazine, the online pornography industry is worth about $1 billion a year and there are at least 260million adult sex pages on the web. The problem is that adults aren't the only ones watching.

In 2003, a survey of Australian teenagers by the Australia Institute in Canberra showed 84 per cent of boys and 60 per cent of girls aged 16 and 17 had stumbled on sex sites on the internet and more than half admitted to searching for it.

"Some people argue that it's not a big deal," says Clive Hamilton, co-author of the report Youth and Pornography in Australia. "They say, well, we all got caught with an old Playboy magazine when we were kids and it didn't do us any harm. But with the internet, we're not talking about Playboy. We're talking about extremely violent, sadistic sexual practices, rape sites, incest and bestiality, all of it freely available to very young teenagers who don't even have to verify their age."

Hamilton believes widespread access to hard-core pornography - and, more generally, the sexualisation of Western culture - is having an influence on the way people in the wider community are behaving. He points to a study from the Canberra Hospital in 2003 in which social workers reported a significant rise in the number of very young children viewing pornography and then asking their playmates for sex.

"These children had stumbled on sex sites and they were acting out what they saw," Hamilton says. "We can all see that sex has been robbed of its emotional depth, especially for young adults who may have grown up with free and easy access to pornography. For young men and women, it's increasingly a physical activity, often with no real pleasure and no meaning at all."

Hamilton says pornography has normalised sex practices that once were taboo and may encourage men and women "to regard each other not as humans but as things, for sex".

He notes the case of Dianne Brimble, the mother of three who died aboard a Pacific Sky cruise. In a revolting display of misogyny and inhumanity, one of the persons of interest described her as as fat and an "ugly dog" who "f--ed up" his holiday by dying on the floor of his cabin.

Then there is Footy Chicks, a documentary screening at the Sydney Film Festival, which shows women boasting of having sex with a whole team of footballers, of going out specifically to get laid by as many men as possible. Anecdotally, one also hears of lipstick parties, where teenage girls wearing different coloured lipstick line up to give oral sex to boys (with the aim of giving them a candy-striped penis); and "pig on the spit" parties where women are willingly penetrated anally, vaginally and orally simultaneously.

"You have to ask what is going on here," Hamilton says. "If you go through a whole football team, what sort of physical pleasure could there be? It's done purely for bragging rights and it's a pretty weird thing for a young woman to do.

"And the yobbos on the cruise liner who head out looking for instant, emotionless gratification, well, that's precisely how sex is depicted in most pornography."

Feminist writer Naomi Wolf told reporters in Sydney last month that she, too, was concerned about the effect of pornography on the young. "Girls ... getting drunk and having anal sex with strangers on Saturday night. Why? Because that is the premium kind of sex that pornography is representing right now." She cited a university where anal fissures (a split caused by anal sex) had become a problem among young girls.

Community concern over free and easy access to porn by the young last year prompted Liberal senator Guy Barnett and 62 members of the Coalition to write to the Prime Minister calling for a ban on offensive, X-rated websites. Barnett tells Inquirer he was acting for "families and children. I've got three of my own, both of the older ones (aged 12 and 10) are developing their own website. Kids go on the internet and it's just far too easy for them to stumble on to adult sites. I've heard people say: 'It's the same as it always was when we were kids, except instead of magazines it's on the internet. But it isn't the same. In the old days, you had to be an adult, you had to go to an adult store, you had to show ID and get your material from the back of the store and then bring it home. Now it's just everywhere."

Communications Minister Helen Coonan responded to community concern this week by announcing a plan to give parents a rebate for installing software that filters out adult sites. Barnett says the rebate is a big step forward but there is more to do. "My preference is an automatic, ISP filter," he says. "Because, to me, there's a direct link between access to pornography and the type of terrible behaviour we are seeing in the community."

However, many in the community are concerned that the debate over children's access to pornography will spill into the mainstream, leading to wider bans on X-rated sites for adults.

The debate over whether access to pornography can change the way a person behaves - or, indeed, whether it will ultimately lead to the collapse of Western culture - has raged for decades, even centuries. Anti-porn crusaders often quote American serial killer Ted Bundy, who claimed in his last interview before being put to death that he was mentally normal until he encountered pornography. "We are your sons and we are your husbands, and we grew up in regular families," he said. "And pornography can reach out and snatch a kid out of any house today."

But most psychologists say that's nonsense. Australian Psychological Society spokesman Bob Montgomery says two significant international studies in Britain and the US have concluded "without any doubt that pornography is mostly harmless and should be freely available to adults who want to see it".

"Watching porn does not turn people into monsters," Montgomery says. "It increases the desire to go home and make passionate love to your wife or to masturbate, that's all. A lot of people use it, and use it sensibly. And as for whether it's corrupting the young, well, look at the surveys. Almost all the indicators show that young people today are happy, healthy people with attitudes that are remarkably similar to their parents."

University of Sydney gender studies lecturer Kath Albury agrees that popular culture is saturated with pornography and "plenty of high schoolers could today tell you what a dildo is or what anal sex is, but kids are not monkey-see, monkey-do. Just because you see something on the internet, doesn't mean you go out and do it. I mean, there is donkey sex on the web, but do we have a widespread problem with people having sex with donkeys? No."

One of the world's leading sex criminologists, Ehor Boyanowsky of the Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, agrees that "all the evidence suggests pornography does no harm to ordinary people".

"Think about it: pornography is a massive industry," he says. "You can get whatever you want now and it's all freely available to anybody who can use a computer. There is violence, rape, incest, bestiality, sex with octogenarians, and do we see a massive increase in sex crimes as a result? No, we don't. It's counter-intuitive, but wherever there has been more access to pornography, there is less sex crime, much less sex crime. And we in the West have, in recent years, become much less tolerant of sex crimes. If there are sex crimes in remote communities, it isn't because of pornography."

Boni Robertson of Griffith University's Gumurrii Centre in Nathan, Queensland, who co-wrote a report on sexual abuse and violence in Aboriginal communities in 1999, agrees that it is a mistake to get sidetracked by pornography.

"I'm gob-smacked because it's such nonsense," she says. "It's the grog that's our problem, the grog. The statement that our communities are saturated with porn and that we just can't control ourselves, it just takes us back to that image of the black savage and it takes our focus off the real problem."

Boyanowsky says pornography has encouraged a new sexual revolution in the West, in that it has trivialised sex.

"There has been a normalisation of oral, anal sex, group sex and other types of sex. It's no longer regarded as shameful to have different types of sex," he says. "But I think this is possibly healthier. Some people have a moral objection to this kind of behaviour, but if you have a classic, liberal democratic society, well, it is our peril that we create social policy and law based on what offends us rather than what is bad.

"Everybody has their own standards, but in a secular society what we say is: 'We will tolerate that. Unless you can prove there is some universal harm here, we will not constrain you.' And as for the children, well, we as parents must arm them with a sense of self-worth. That has always been the job of parents."

Hamilton agrees, saying he thinks schools should get involved, too.

"In addition to telling kids about safe sex, how to avoid HIV, what about a program of sexual ethics?" Hamilton says. "Because at the moment you've got a 15-year-old boy in the playground and his only experience of sex is watching disturbing things at home. Well, somebody should be telling him enduring, fulfilling relationships aren't like that."

Copyright © 2006 The Weekend Australian